ary engineers, an Irish
foreman, two or three young mining men, and a score of Mexicans. Of
course, my first impulse was to get out the next morning, to cut it--it
was none of my business--although I determined to drop a line to Henry
Martin; but I didn't go. I had a talk with Mrs. Whitney that night,
after her attractive husband had taken himself off to bed, and somehow I
couldn't leave just then. You know how it is, you drop into a place
where nothing in the world seems likely to happen, and all of a sudden
you realize that something _is_ going to happen, and for the life of you
you can't go away. That situation up on top of the hill couldn't last
forever, could it? So I stayed on. I hunted out the big Irish foreman
and shared his cabin. The Whitneys asked me to visit them, but I didn't
exactly feel like doing so. The Irishman was a fine specimen of his
race, ten years out from Dublin, and everywhere else since that time;
generous, irascible, given to great fits of gayety and equally
unexpected fits of gloom. He would sit in the evenings, a short pipe in
his mouth, and stare up at the Whitney bungalow on the hill above.

"'That Jim Whitney's a divvle,' he confided to me once. 'Wan of these
days I'll hit him over th' head with a pick and be hung for murther.
Now, what in hell d'ye suppose a nice girl like that sticks by him for?
If it weren't for her I'd 'a' reported him long ago. The scut!' And I
remember that he spat gloomily.

"But I got to know the answer to that question sooner than I had
expected. You see, I went up to the Whitneys' often, in the afternoon,
or for dinner, or in the evening, and I talked to Mrs. Whitney a great
deal; although sometimes I just sat and smoked and listened to her play
the piano. She played beautifully. It was a treat to a man who hadn't
heard music for two years. There was a little thing of Grieg's--a spring
song, or something of the sort--and you've no idea how quaint and sad
and appealing it was, and incongruous, with all its freshness and
murmuring about water-falls and pine-trees, there, in those hot,
breathless Arizona nights. Mrs. Whitney didn't talk much; she wasn't
what you'd call a particularly communicative woman, but bit by bit I
pieced together something continuous. It seems that she had run away
with Whitney ten years before--Oh, yes! Henry Martin! That had been a
schoolgirl affair. Nothing serious, you understand. But the Whitney
matter had been different. She was grea